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The 2026 Tour de France, which starts in Barcelona on Saturday, is steeling itself for climate change disruption with another extreme heatwave predicted to return to Europe in the coming days which could lead to stages being cancelled.
“It’s something that’s very much on our mind,” said Thierry Gouvenou, the Tour’s technical director. “It’s not the first time we have faced this, but this time it’s worse because of what we have already experienced in May and June.”
The Tour has been derailed in the past by wars, strikes, civil unrest and the pandemic, but a stage has never been cancelled because of extreme heat.
The possibility of that happening during this year’s race has become real after temperatures as high as 44C were again predicted for some regions in France and Spain.
The next spell of extreme hot weather could affect the peloton as soon as Sunday, when the Tour’s second stage, over 168 undulating kilometres, follows the Mediterranean coast from Tarragona to Barcelona.
Recent races have been blighted by burning heat. In the Tour de Suisse, the overall leader Elisa Longo Borghini suffered heatstroke and lost almost 10 minutes to her rivals. The Italian was in extreme distress at the finish and had difficulty remembering the race.
“Heatstroke is an extremely serious emergency,” said Emilio Magni, the medical director of the XDS Astana team that is racing in the Tour. “The temperature regulation systems in the brain begin to fail. Then cardiac activity, circulation and the dilation of blood vessels are affected. It is like a short circuit.”
While professional cycling’s extreme weather protocol does allow for extra measures such as additional feeding and drinking, there is little in place that aligns with the furnace temperatures experienced last month in France.
“In the past, we have opened the feed zone from start to finish and extended the time limit. For a few years now, we’ve also had cold drinks motorbikes, for the riders,” Gouvenou said.
Another possibility is starting the Tour’s stages much earlier in the day, but the race is a prisoner of its own global renown. International TV schedules dictate that the key moments take place in the heat of the day, although riders have already called for earlier start times to avoid the crushing mid-afternoon temperatures.
“Instead of having the stage starts as late as we do now, we should move them to nine in the morning to finish by two thirty in the afternoon,” said Pascal Chanteur, the president of France’s professional cyclists union.
The most recent heatwave in France, the hottest since records began, led to a spike in fatalities and to the closures of schools and tourist attractions. That also intensified the demands on the emergency services, which the Tour itself is heavily reliant on, both to safeguard the peloton and the spectators.
But such is the scale of the Tour that it is not able to make changes to its schedules at short notice.
“You have to remember that over 28,000 policemen, emergency service staff and gendarmes are mobilised for the Tour route,” the race director, Christian Prudhomme, said. “These are not arrangements you make at the last minute. We can take a few kilometres out of the stage or start half an hour earlier, but that’s not going to make much difference.”
